SCICEX Surveys

Since the early 1990’s, the SCience ICe EXercises (SCICEX) aboard U.S. Navy nuclear submarines and the deployment of the U.S. icebreakers, USCGC Healy, Polar Star and Polar Sea, have led to an exponential increase in the amount of geophysical data collected in the Arctic Basin. Prior to the creation of this archive, the data was scattered throughout various institutions where they are often difficult to locate and access. To complicate matters even more the supporting metadata were unavailable or of poor quality. There was no infrastructure available to combine or analyze these dataset or to support existing or exploratory scientific investigations. Given the diversity, volume, and complexity of these multidisciplinary data sets, plus proprietary issues associated with having numerous principal investigators (PI’s) from an international community, it was decided to establis this archive to attempt to address these issues and to provide both the casual user and science user with access to an online data repository.